Indian farmers are living in hunger

At a time when change is the buzzword on the political landscape, when cities are changing, and the villages are no longer what they used to be; when incomes are rising for an educated few, and when the bottom of the pyramid – those below the poverty line -- are showered with a series of freebies; perhaps the only segment of the Indian society which hasn’t seen a change all these years is the 60-crore strong farming community.

With nearly 3 lakh farmers taking their own lives in the past 17 years, and with more than 65 per cent farmers’ heavily indebted, agriculture has the dubious distinction of supporting the largest percentage of population with the lowest incomes. The fact that the share of agriculture in country’s GDP is relentlessly sliding, presently hovering at a little over 13 per cent, means that such a large population is living on a thin edge. No wonder, with agriculture becoming highly uneconomical, more than 60 per cent farmers are dependent upon MNREGA wages to make the two ends meet. In other words, the people who grow food for the country are themselves going to bed hungry.

Such is the plight of Indian agriculture that in the past seven years – between 2007 and 2012 – 3.2 crore farmers have abandoned farming and moved into the cities looking for menial jobs. According to census 2011, every day 2,500 farmer quit agriculture. Some other studies have shown that roughly 50,000 people migrate from a village (and that includes farmers) into a town/city every day. As per a NSSO study, 42 per cent farmers want to quit if given an alternative.

Those who leave agriculture, sell off their meager land holdings and trudge to the cities looking for a better livelihood, end up plying rickshaw or working as a daily wage earner in the booming construction activity. Economists and policy makers call this as a sign of economic growth. Moving people out of agriculture is the ultimate growth, claims Raghuram Rajan, the Reserve Bank of India chief. Pushing them out of agriculture and forcing them to join the ranks of landless workers is the new economic mantra.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says that 70 per cent farmers are not required, and should be moved out of agriculture. World Bank wants India to move 40-crore people from the villages into the cities by the year 2015. I have never understood the economic logic behind such a massive translocation of the population from the rural into the urban areas. These are people who are somehow driving their livelihood from farming or other related activities in the villages. They may be under-employed but to force them out of the villages so as to provide temporary cheap labour for the growing construction and real estate industry is no solution to the continuing agrarian crisis.

Agriculture is the biggest employer in the country. By creating conditions that makes agriculture economically unviable we are only adding to the jobless growth. Take another Planning Commission study. It showed that at a time when the country’s GDP was hovering between 8-9 per cent between 2005 and 2009, more than 1.40 crore farmers had left agriculture. Normally it is believed that these farmers would be employed in the manufacturing sector. But manufacturing sector too showed a negative growth, cutting down on 57 lakh jobs. So where did these millions go?  

In such a depressing scenario, moving people out of agriculture does not make any economic and political sense. In fact, it serves a double whammy for the poor farmers. They sell-off their meager land holdings and move into the cities. But when the economic growth slows down even the daily wage jobs in cities dry up. They are therefore forced back into the villages and in the absence of any land to fall back upon they are left with no choice but to become completely dependent upon MNREGA jobs or serve as a farm worker. According to a CRISIL study, 1.5 crore farmers are expected to be returning back to the villages between 2012 and 2014 because there is no work available even in the cities.

The push to move a significant proportion of the population from the rural to the urban areas is reflected in the economic policies. To me there is nothing more worrying than the inability of the mainline economists to understand the social, economic and political implications of such a massive demographic change. By the year 2030, may studies estimate that roughly 50 per cent of the population would be staying in the cities. This certainly will bring in tremendous pressure on the government to create more employment opportunities in the cities, which unfortunately will not happen because the economic growth paradigm is based upon jobless growth.

If any meaningful change has to happen, it has to happen in agriculture. But if you are looking at a change in the form of encouragement for contract farming and corporate agriculture coupled with land acquisitions, it’s not going to address the terrible agrarian crisis. It needs a different prescription which is beyond the scope of the economic textbooks. It has to come in the form of providing gainful employment in the rural areas with focus on revitalizing sustainable farming. Hibre Bazar village in Maharashtra has shown that it is possible. From a perennially drought-prone village, Hibre Bazar now boasts of 60 millionaires in the same village.

It all begins by restoring the community control over the natural resources. Gram Sabhas have to be accorded supremacy in decision-making, and the emphasis has to shift to making agriculture sustainable in the long run and also making it economically viable. Providing farmers with a guaranteed monthly income will ensure economic stability. Once agriculture becomes profitable, farmers will resist the pressure as well as allurements to sell-off their farm lands. This can only be possible if the Reserve Bank of India formulates macro-economic policies that shift the focus to rebuilding the village economy. Unfortunately, it is presently following the IMF/World Bank prescription that calls for a massive rural-urban population shift.

Agriculture has to be ploughed back as the mainstay of Indian economy. It has the ability to provide gainful employment to two-third of the population, maintain environmental balance, and ensure food security for the nation. And as Dr M S Swaminathan has often said the future belongs to not those countries which have weapons, but those which have food. Let’s not fritter away the nation’s future by killing agriculture. That’s the change that India needs

Farmers Income Commission is now a reality in India. Karnataka becomes the first state to establish it.

Karnataka has done it. Last week it announced the setting up of a Farmers Income Commission. The terms and conditions have yet to be formulated. If implemented properly, and followed up in Punjab, it can be the game changer for Indian agriculture which is reeling under a terrible agrarian distress. 

Noted agricultural scientist Dr M S Swaminathan sees merit in this. Thanking me for persuading the Karnataka government to establish an income commission, he wrote in a personal communication: “The National Policy for Farmers calls for a paradigm shift from measuring agricultural progress in terms of production to measuring progress by the real rate in the growth of the farmers income….This is the need of the hour.”   

Six years after I first demanded the need to provide farmers with an assured monthly income, the nation is gradually waking up to the desperate need for such a body to address the fundamental issue of income security among country's exasperated farming community. Credit will go to former Karnataka Chief Minister Y S Yeddurappa who very patiently listened to me, discussed its pros and cons and agreed to set up such a body. Present Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar finally announced it as part of the agricultural budget presented in Feb 2013. 

By providing income in the hands of farmers, the mainstay of the economy, we are actually providing the real stimulus to kick-start the economy.

In my opinion, modern farming leads to two kinds of agriculture. First, is the highly subsidised agriculture in the western countries. And second, it results in subsistence agriculture, as is being witnessed in the developing world. The only way to bail out subsistence farmers is to provide them with direct income support, as is being done in the rich and industrialised countries.

Let us make a comparison. In the 10-year period, between 1997 and 2008, the National Crime Record Bureau tells us that approximately 2.40 lakh farmers had committed suicide primarily to escape the humiliation that comes along with growing indebtedness. Another 42 per cent want to quit agriculture if given an alternative. In the US on the other hand, between 1995 and 2009, farmers have been paid Rs 12.50 lakh crore as farm subsidies, including direct income support. In other words, while our farmers were reeling under mounting debt, US farmers got a fat cheque sitting at home.

In Europe, the economic handouts are more lucrative. Farmers receive a per hectare subsidy in the form of direct income support of Rs 4,000. In the case of cereals alone, if you multiply Rs 4,000 with 2.2 lakh hectares area sown in 27 countries of European Union, it comes to a staggering Rs 90.40 lakh crore.

At a time when all out efforts are to launch the 2nd Green Revolution, buoyed with genetically modified crops, and stricter IPR laws that will shift the control over seed into the hands of private agribusiness companies, the market structure being laid out -- contract farming, food retail, commodity exchanges, and future trading -- all aim at making farmers economically viable, will actually allow the companies to walk away with more profits and leave farmers with empty pockets.  

If all this was workable, and was bringing income to farmers, there is no reason why the US and EU governments for instance would be providing huge subsidies, much of it in the form of direct income support or income transfer in one form or the other, to their miniscule population of farmers.

For 45 years, the dominant breed of bureaucrats and technocrats, have been telling farmers that the more they produce the more will be their income. By saying so they were actually not helping farmers, but in the name of farmers promoting the commercial interests of fertiliser, pesticides, seed and mechanical equipment companies. No wonder, the average monthly income of a farming family in 2003-04, which includes five members of a family plus two cattle, had been worked out by NSSO at a paltry Rs 2115. The NSSO has since stopped measuring farm income.

Under the 6^th Pay Commission, a peon or a chaprasi in government service gets a minimum monthly salary of Rs 15,000. A farming family earns less than Rs 2115 (in terms of prevalent prices, it would be around Rs 2,400 a month). Can’t we as a nation even think of providing farmers with an income that equals what a chaprasigets?

If Rs 2115 is the monthly income of a farming family (in Punjab, it hovers around Rs 3,200) shouldn't we as a nation hang our head in shame? If agriculture was indeed profitable, I see no reason why rural despair would increasingly drive farmers to take their own lives. Even in the frontline agricultural state of Punjab, two farmers commit suicide every day. As per a recent house-to-house survey, 19 people succumb to cancer ever day in Punjab ostensibly from the excessive use and abuse of chemicals in agriculture.

Farmers were made to believe that putting more inputs would bring them more profits. They are now being told that free markets -- commodity exchange, future trading and food retail – will make farming profitable and economically viable. What is not being told is that it didn't work in the US and the European Union. And it will therefore not work in India.

Look at the way such a flawed approach is being aggressively promoted in India. The beneficiaries of future trading and commodity exchange are not the farmers but speculators, the consultancy firms and rating agencies, and the business. And again, this is being done in the name of farmers. On the other hand, farmer unions have been only asking for a higher minimum support price (MSP). None of them have visualised that there are barely 35 to 40 per cent farmers in the country who ultimately get the benefit of procurement prices since they have some surplus to sell in the mandis.  

The rest of the farming community, which is in a majority, also produces food. Even if they hardly have anything to sell, they at least produce food. If they were not to produce food for themselves, the country would be importing that quantity of food. In other words, they produce economic wealth. Therefore they too need to be adequately compensated for the economic wealth they produce for the country. #